On the streets with San Jose's anti-gang unit; two murder suspects arrested in one stop

SAN JOSE -- Dusk hadn't yet taken hold when Officer Bruce Barthelemy spotted the suspected triggerman in one of the city's darkest murders of the year.

A photo bulletin about 23-year-old Johnny Lozano was distributed to officers earlier in the day. There he was, suspected of killing an innocent nursing student, walking in broad daylight near Senter Road in the city's south side, either unaware or unafraid of the fact he was the most wanted man in San Jose.

Within moments, another officer arrived, and Barthelemy, no stranger to danger after two shootouts in the past nine months, teamed up with him to detain Lozano, who surrendered quietly. The parolee was carrying a loaded handgun and illegal drugs when he was arrested the evening of Aug. 7.

In an unusual twist, Lozano happened to be walking with 18-year-old Darius McNary, who was wanted in the fatal shooting of a bouncer outside a Sunnyvale bar in June. Two murder arrests spawned from a serendipitous police stop.

It marked one of the most successful nights for acting Chief Larry Esquivel's gang-suppression campaign, launched at the start of the summer to combat a surge in gang violence alarming enough that it prompted crisis-level meetings between police brass and the city's gang interventionists.

Efforts paying off

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To date, San Jose police have made more than 300 gang-related felony and misdemeanor arrests and, more significantly, there have been no gang killings since police began to saturate the streets on June 20. The largely overtime-funded plan, highlighted by 20 two-man gang cars and more than 40 extra officers deployed during the week, bolstered ongoing efforts by the Gang Investigations Unit and the elite Metro and MERGE (the city's SWAT unit) teams. As a result, a 16 percent drop in violent gang crimes reported in July appears to be holding steady as the department draws down the summer surge.

"They've done their job and kept a lid on this stuff. They'll keep on doing it every day," said Sgt. John Boren of the Metro special enforcement team, which has long doubled as a de facto gang unit in the department's "all gangs, all the time" mission.

The handgun seized from Lozano was of considerable interest given its potential role in the slaying of 19-year-old Kimberly Chico, a San Jose State nursing student who the previous weekend was riding in a car among the bars and clubs downtown when﻿ a bullet whistled into the vehicle.

A tattooed man is handcuffed while being questioned by San Jose Police Department's gang-suppression detail in south San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday evening Aug. 7, 2013. No one was arrested in the stop, but a knife was confiscated and a truck was impounded. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
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Karl Mondon
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She was caught in a crossfire, police said, with investigators describing her as a "true victim" who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and city leaders calling her killing a "punch in the gut." Lozano, who police say has gang ties and is suspected of firing the fatally errant shot, has since been charged with murder. The handgun is undergoing tests to determine whether it was the murder weapon.

A veteran officer, Barthelemy was two hours into his shift monitoring one of several known gang "hot spots" when he saw Lozano. Other such spots include Virginia Avenue and King Road, where a 16-year-old boy's execution-style slaying June 19 at the hands of a gang mob was a tipping point in inspiring the crackdown.

Restoring safety

Detectives designated the hot spots based on consultations with such groups as the city's civilian gang task force, which has deep community ties in neighborhoods where gang violence is an everyday part of life.

"It's an example of San Jose's collaboration," said Mario Maciel, superintendent of the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force. "We can re-establish a sense of safety after an uptick."

About an hour after Lozano's arrest, other officers in the same gang detail rushed to reports of a brawl in the carport of an apartment complex at Tradewinds Drive and Eagles Lane, behind Oak Grove High School.

The combatants were gone when police arrived. But they stopped a gray truck with two men inside that witnesses said was fleeing the area.

One of the men, adorned in more than a dozen tattoos showing allegiance to the Mexican Mafia, recently served eight years in a Texas prison on a burglary conviction. He also told officers he was stabbed 15 times in an attack on 14th Street in San Jose more than a decade ago.

He and an acquaintance sat on a curb while police searched their vehicle, finding an illegal butterfly knife. The men were eventually released -- though their truck was impounded because of the driver's suspended license and the weapon confiscated -- as the team moved on.

Practical decisions are made throughout the night: weighing an arrest and prospects for prosecution against the amount of time it will keep police out of the field. On this night, they decided the priority was to eliminate the threat of the weapon and, perhaps just as important, announce their presence in a neighborhood where trouble is on the rise.

After nearly two months of targeted patrols, there has been a noticeable drop in gang activity out in the open, both police and gang interventionists say.

"There was a time when everyone would be out," Boren said. "People would either hunt (for rivals) or meander down here."

Maciel said residents have taken notice of the clearer sidewalks and streets.

"We may not always be able to stop the spikes, but this shows when we set our efforts in the same direction, we can have a visible effect on communities," he said.

Police brass hope that will continue with the August launch of the Gang Suppression Unit, a team of officers dedicated solely to gang issues. It's a resurrection of sorts of the Violent Crimes Enforcement Team, a successful gang squad disbanded in 2010 for budgetary reasons. It was credited, along with city efforts like the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force, for San Jose repeatedly attaining the status of the nation's safest large city in the early to mid-2000s.

Several officers in the new group are enforcement team veterans, seasoned in tracking and identifying gang trends and intelligence.

The formation of the new unit creatively reallocates limited police resources: Two sergeants and 12 officers were shifted over mostly from Metro, a team that traditionally handles vice crimes like prostitution and executes high-risk arrests and search warrants.

"It's symbolic, but yet it's specific in that our public and citizens know this is an important issue for us; it's a priority for us to stem the violence," Esquivel said.

Maciel, the city's head gang interventionist, said he is heartened by the formation of the dedicated gang unit, calling it a more sustainable response given that police say they already spent a "large portion" of its annual $1.1 million gang-suppression budget on the summer surge.

He said such surges in staffing should be standard during spikes in violence, but it carries significant trade-offs. Those include questions about the huge overtime costs and officer burnout but also philosophical ones about overreliance on police to combat a social problem.

"We should mobilize when we need it," Maciel said. "But it can't be all enforcement. We can't just be an enforcement city."

Patrolling the streets

Out on the gang patrol, Officers Anthony Baza and Kris Ferguson walked a beat along a poorly lit row of apartment complexes behind Independence High School, flanked by Dumpsters tagged with the markings of local gang offshoots. They stopped and questioned a probationer, then moved on to a footbridge that spans 10 lanes of Interstate 680 connecting two parts of Madden Avenue between McKee Road and Alum Rock Avenue.

The bridge is disputed territory in a trench warfare-like struggle between gangs who use graffiti to mark the bridge as their own.

"They'll try to gain ground, see how far they can get before someone on the other side sees them. People shoot across the bridge," Baza said.

Back on the south side, Officers Jon Anderson and Adam Dorn slowed their unmarked car to a crawl as they inspected back alleys and darkened carports of the dense apartments that dot Roundtable Drive, a long-known hot spot.

The distinct engine sound of the police cruiser is a giveaway to gang mainstays and wannabes, who often whistle and give other improvised alerts that the cops are coming through.

To Esquivel, that's part of the point.

"It's about being out in the community ... and getting to know who those gang members are and having those citizens feel comfortable talking to the officers they see on a regular basis," he said.

A summer gang-suppression campaign by the San Jose Police Department has resulted in a roughly 16 percent decrease in gang violence after a bloody stretch that spurred the initiative. The following figures cover June 20-Aug. 10.